Women's Suffrage Movement

Kendall Sullins American Literature 19 April 2024 Ms. McMonigle Research Paper “You cannot lift the world at all while half of it is kept so small.” (Smithsonian Magazine) A quote well said by a suffragist who had confronted a Socialist. Many people seem to have forgotten the true meaning of being united. Most people think since the women's suffrage movement has passed, that women play an equal role in society. They have the right to vote, to work, and have their own assets, however they have to work five times harder to gain any credit for them. To many, women’s continuous fight for coverage in the media annoys them, or is seen as unnecessary. Women who use their voice or ask for true equal representation often face backlash from the public. …show more content…
Even women in business rooms or law firms have to deal with sexual harassment, underpayment. At any place of employment, women are susceptible to some kind of discrimination. Despite our society showcasing women in almost everything, some of our largest industries are continuing to push sexist roles and agendas for women, continuously impacting our future generation of women as well as many children everywhere. While women were struggling to gain equal rights, they were given government representation. When the Nascent Socialist Party of America was founded in 1901, they wanted to represent women’s suffrage, and recruit women to their party. As of 1909, two-thousand of their fifty-thousand registrants were women. This allowed women to have an involvement in politics that was unachievable before. However, the male membership could not steer away from their misogynistic views and it wasn’t until ten years after the party was formed, firebrand Lena Morrow Lewis warned one of her cohorts: “because a man labels himself Socialist does not endow him with brains nor make him broad minded and liberal in his …show more content…
Whether it's a history book, or an old story, women are often portrayed in the same way. They were given the nurturing role, the parent role. They were belittled rather than praised for speaking out, or advocating for their opinions, yet older and even current films are filled with men doing the same thing. “ Untermann identified his comrades’ sexism as being rooted in men’s fear that expansion of a woman’s horizons would make her more self-reliant and “less willing to swallow all the crooked logic of the ‘superior’ male mind.””( Ernest Unterman ) If a woman’s curiosity is deemed as frightening, she must be apart of a egotistical community of the superior male species. There will always be those people who let their ego get the best of them, and refuse to tarnish it for a moment. Many women such as Reese Witherspoon, who was sexually assaulted on set at the age of 16, were afraid to speak out after they faced similar situations because “Hollywood has been silencing women and tricking them into staying silent” (Reese

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